TODAY IN MISSION YEARBOOK
Mission Yearbook: Vicar challenges audience to practice joy as spiritual resistance
The Rev. Lizzie McManus-Dail stood before hundreds of college students, holding up medieval manuscript images of the Virgin Mary — not cradling the infant Jesus, but beating the devil with a stick.
“This is probably not the picture you would find in Hobby Lobby underneath a nice throw pillow that says ‘joy,’” she told the crowd during the opening keynote of the 2026 Montreat College Conference. “This is what it is: taking a spear right through the evil and the sin and the death and the tyranny.”
McManus-Dail, vicar of Jubilee Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas, delivered an address titled “How to Practice Joy When the World Is Falling Apart,” delving into the conference’s theme of “Strains of Joy.” She returned for a workshop where students engaged the same themes while creating art projects.
McManus-Dail began by distinguishing her understanding of joy from easy happiness. She recounted standing at a funeral for a beloved 90-year-old family member and hearing the liturgical proclamation “Alleluia. Christ is risen.”
“Even at the grave, we make our song: Alleluia,” she said, explaining that the word literally means “praise God.” The priest, who has walked with parishioners through traumatic deaths and experienced profound loss in her own life, argued that joy is most critical precisely when it feels impossible. She described joy not as a feeling that happens to us, but as “looking for God's abundance in the face of the world's scarcity.”
Drawing on research by Brené Brown, McManus-Dail identified joy as “the most vulnerable human emotion” because “when we feel joy, we want to immediately clap up, put a little wall around it.” She challenged the audience to reject what she called the world’s commodification of joy — the idea that happiness can be purchased through control, consumption or isolation from pain.
McManus-Dail shared her experience of giving birth via C-section, describing the visceral sensation of lying on an operating table “like being on a cross” while bringing life into the world. A phrase from her friend came to her: “To bring life into this world, you must face death.”
Ten years ago, four of McManus-Dail's family members — her aunt, uncle and two cousins — were killed in a plane crash. McManus-Dail spoke of how creativity became a spiritual practice of resistance. “To face death, you must bring life,” she said, inverting her earlier phrase.
“Creativity in the face of anti-creation, participating in the midwifery of God in the face of everything that tries to kill God and us — that is Christian joy.”
McManus-Dail turned to Mary as an exemplar of joy in the face of suffering, noting her title as “Our Lady, Queen of Heaven and Empress of Hell.” She read Mary’s Magnificat from Luke 1, emphasizing its themes of social reversal: “God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.”
Medieval Christians facing plague and political oppression, McManus-Dail explained, depicted Mary defeating evil with fierce strength rather than passive submission. She described an act of creative resistance in her transformation of her chasuble, a liturgical garment McManus-Dail wears. The pink chasuble was transformed with Rit dye and decorated with an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe and sequins from her late aunt’s craft supplies.
McManus-Dail closed with a warning and an invitation. “Tyrants,” she said, “want nothing more than for us to think about them, that every headline, that every thought, that everything we think about, talk about and dream about to be about them.”
“They are not our story,” she said. “They are not the whole story.” She urged students to practice “small acts of creation” daily as resistance against despair. “Joy has teeth,” she declared. “Joy is a spiritual discipline.”
“I love the theology,” said Jacob, a conference-goer from Statesboro, Georgia, who specifically asked about the story behind the pink chasuble. Jacob has been following “Rev. Lizzie” on Instagram and TikTok for years. He said he loved the part of her keynote “when she was talking about that within God, God is community within itself.” Jacob also loved the premise of McManus-Dail’s book, “God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us.” “God didn't need to create us but chose to create us as uniquely special,” said Jacob.
Beth Waltemath, Communications Strategist, Presbyterian Life & Witness (Click here to read original PNS Story)
Let us join in prayer for:
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Let us pray:
Gracious God, where there are countless reasons to be hopeless, overcome them all, so that the world may see communities of people come alive, reborn and renewed in Christ’s name. Amen.